Supreme Court leaves Section 230 alone in case blaming social media in terror death

If the Supreme Court has an eye to pruning or felling Section 230, the legal rule that shields websites and other internet services from liability for for stuff posted on them by others, Gonzalez v. Google is not their weapon of choice.

In an unsigned opinion in the case known as Gonzalez v. Google, the high court said it declined to address the application of the law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to a "complaint that appears to state little, if any plausible claim for relief."

The dispute stemmed from a lawsuit brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American college student who was among the 129 people killed in Paris by ISIS terrorists in November 2015, against Google, which owns YouTube, in 2016. The Gonzalez family alleged the tech giant aided and abetted ISIS in violation of a federal anti-terrorism statute by recommending videos posted by the terror group to users.

Good news for web publishers; this is reportedly the first time the Supreme Court considered the scope of the Section 230, and they decided not yet to consider it further.